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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4806688" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 122: June 1987part 1/5108 pages. Black dragons don't breathe fire! You of all people should know that. [/pedant] Seriously, welcome to their 11th birthday. The times, they are still a-changin around here. The upcoming edition changes for both D&D and Top Secret cause many readers much distress. Top secret in particular is a problem, because they've made it clear that the changes are going to be big and the new rules are not going to be easily convertable to the old ones. They say that they'll dual stat the crunchy bits in new articles, but we all know promises like that by a company rarely last long. Still, at least they're asking us what we want to see at the moment, rather than telling us. In this issue: Letters: A letter asking if they ever plan to do a D&D comic book, and what the current situation on the D&D movie is. Roger is pretty positive about the first idea, and forced to report that the second seems to have died a slow development death with Gary's departure. Bleah. A letter from someone who didn't get one of the april fools jokes two years ago, asking for free photocopies. Howe Audacious is not a real person. Stop bugging us! Drive a man mad, int it, blood. A letter from a 13 year old asking if conventions have age limits. Generally, no. Especially not ones covering topics with a large youth demographic. That would massively cut their profitability. A letter praising the ecology articles, and asking to make More! Bigger! Covering non AD&D creatures as well! Roger has no objection to the idea, but really, this is up to the freelancers as much as anything. Send in your own ecologies now! Your magazine needs you! A letter asking for help constructing their own Dragonchess game. Unfortunately, the people most involved in that have since left TSR, so Roger can't help much. The technology still isn't really there to build a good board at an economical price, either. Boo. Forum is extra long this month, as they let people get their opinions in about the state of gaming as a whole: Dana Foley reminds us that the spirit of the various articles is more important than their letter. Trying to follow them slavishly without understanding the reasoning behind them will only cause trouble. Anthony Tennaro thinks that weapons ought to cause more damage next edition. Characters can be hit in vital areas repeatedly to no effect. This isn't realistic. It was never intended to be. Abstraction, my dear. Craig Ulmer would like to see an article on how you improvise as a DM. Um. You make it up yourself. If you're following rules someone else made, then it essentially becomes playing the blues rather than true freeform improvisation. While that can be fun, it hardly compares to genuine DM'ing skill developed by years of personal trial and error. Sylvain Robert shows up again, quibbling about the nature of weapon specialization, who can have it, and how many weapons they can specialize in. Your pregens from an adventure break the rules as written. Trusting module writers to get all the stats right is a foolish thing to do. Just fix them, and play your game the way you want too, instead of trusting to a canon that is self contradictory anyway. Chris Patterson thinks that it's important to enforce consequences for alignment deviations, especially for classes with moral codes. We must not allow psycho dick paladins to retain their powers. W Brian Barnes thinks that with the recent supplement bloat, UA and it's questionable ideas in particular, the AD&D game has lost it's way. The new edition needs to get back to that original spirit, of allowing us plenty of freedom to keep all the optional bits out if we choose. Flexibility is a good thing. Ed Friedlander reminds us that for a good cleric, doing good should be a pleasure, both for them, and the people they follow. If it's not, then you're playing it wrong. Being utterly po-faced about your religion is an attitude more suited to lawful neutral and evil types. Humour, music, parables, and using magic for entertainment are all entirely suitable actions for a preacher. And the next edition really ought to have proper rules for conversion of your opponents. Pacifism ought to be a valid character choice in D&D. Hmm. Radical ideas here. Scott Gilpatric thinks that it should be possible to allow automated reprints of old articles by loading them onto computer disk, and then allowing people to order them, and print them out from their own printer via modem connection. Plus you could double the service up as a bulletin board. My oh my. That's a very forward thinking idea indeed. I very much approve. Martin Gibbs agrees with Craig Sessions that sexism is bad, and so is judging people without giving them a fair chance to prove themselves. That kind of prejudice is hurtful to them, and harmful to you in the long run, because you miss out on so many cool opportunities. S D Anderson reminds us just how heavy 1000 gp is, and suggests that giving xp for money is a bad idea. It can be gamed horribly, and results in unfair and over fast advancements. This is another thing about the game that needs fixing. Robert Montgomery thinks that the problem with alignment is not the existence of good and evil, but the way you define these words. As long as you do that properly, you can have evil PC's without any problem. That's treading perilously close to the moral relativism argument. W Brian Barnes shows up a second time in a single issue. This time he argues that balancing out magic-users power at high levels by making them painfully wimpy at low levels is not balance at all, and actually makes things worse. True balance should be applicable at all points through the game, not over time. Some serious revision is needed to make that the case. Oh, you don't know the half of it. I wonder what his opinion of 4e is. Jeanne McGuire is another returning forumite. She examines the math of wizard's intelligence and spells known. picking holes in all the problems that come up and suggesting solutions. One of those letters that seems like it ought to be a proper article, but couldn't quite make up the length. Stephen Barnecut is also examining the rules for wizards, and trying to clarify the ones for spellbooks. Having them scattered throughout the books really does make getting a clear picture a bugger. Let's get working to fix this. Scott Luzzo delivers another almost article, about the procedure for recharging charged items. The rules on this are currently unclear, so I shall make up my own and share them with you. I do not object to this idea at all.</blockquote>

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